NRx: The (underground) movement that wants to destroy democracy

The future could be an ultra-capitalist and hyper-technological neo-monarchy. Beyond other, more widespread futuristic imaginings, this is what’s proposed by the neo-reactionary movement (NRx), also known as the Dark Enlightenment. Those who adhere to it believe that liberal democracy is a mistake and that equality isn’t a desirable end. In short, it’s all a farce.

NRx advocates in favor of techno-authoritarianism: that societies should be governed by a king-CEO… like a highly hierarchical company, with citizens acting as veritable shareholders. These are ideas — surrounded by an underground, obscurantist and gloomy halo — that have a connection with the alt-right. And they could infiltrate Donald Trump’s next administration through the magnates of Silicon Valley.

The Enlightenment ideas were previously criticized by the Frankfurt School, or the postmodernists: those (apparently) luminous ideals of Eurocentric “rationality” and “progress” had led to control and domination, the justification of colonialism, as well as the technological sophistication of war and the industrialized destruction of nature. NRx, on the other hand, is a critique of the Enlightenment from far-right positions. The “Dark” Enlightenment is a disturbing oxymoron that proposes a mix of the ancien régime with the ideology of Silicon Valley. The goal is to reach a pragmatic — yet elitist — solution that restores order and stability in turbulent times. “In their opinion, if the market isn’t democratic from an egalitarian point of view — if, in the market, Elon Musk and I will never be equal — what’s the point of democracy?” explains Jaime Caro, a historian who researches the extreme-right.

NRx is a clandestine movement: it has no visible leaders, no solid organizations, nor the official backing of think tanks. Its ideas emerge in conservative rallies, podcasts, or marginal blogs. “It would be difficult to find more than a handful of people outside the conservative movement who know about these ideas,” says Mike Wendling, author of Alt-Right: From 4Chan to the White House (2018). “But, in a way, that’s an advantage,” he adds.

The true influence of the neo-reactionary movement isn’t its presence as such, but rather the way in which it has slyly infiltrated different areas, from Silicon Valley to Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, through the universe of cryptocurrencies, or the Republican Party. “Elon Musk is the most notable example, but there are many others. These people tend to believe that they’re the masters of the universe: they want fewer regulations, while wanting to take advantage of government contracts,” Wendling sighs. The growing perception of the migrant population as simply being temporary and transient labor — instead of the traditional idea of those who arrive being in pursuit of the American dream — also has neo-reactionary roots. Curtis Yarvin, one of the movement’s promoters, boasts that his position is always the opposite of Noam Chomsky’s.

The product of conservative disaffection

Movements like NRx emerged from the disaffection with the traditional American right. This began in the final stages of George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2009), following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and amid the financial crisis. “These circumstances seemed to indicate that Bush’s version of conservatism was discredited and opened up an opportunity for right-wing alternatives,” explains George Hawley, a professor at the University of Alabama and author of The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (2018).

From this breeding ground emerged the Tea Party movement, which fiercely confronted Barack Obama in a libertarian and populist drift… but without straying far from the usual right-wing framework. At the same time, more marginal neo-reactionary ideas began to appear, convinced that the traditional right was incapable of achieving structural changes.

In those days, it’s easy to imagine Curtis Yarvin in a dimly lit room, illuminated by the computer screen, typing away with a desire for transgression. He’s a computer engineer from New York and a former progressive who began to develop his ideas under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldbug. He writes on his blog, Unqualified Reservations, which he launched in 2007. In that space, Moldbug promises to “cure your brain,” offering readers a so-called “red pill” (in reference to the film The Matrix) that will free them from the ideas of left-wing thinker Chomsky.

Moldbug is a declared follower of Thomas Carlyle, a 19th-century Scottish philosopher who distrusted equality and democracy. He proposed a “government of heroes,” exceptional individuals who are the protagonists of history and must guide their societies (like Hegel’s “great men,” who embody the zeitgeist or spirit of their times). The influence of the contemporary German anarcho-capitalist Hans-Hermann Hoppe — or the neo-fascist, Nazi occultist Julius Evola — also led the software engineer to distrust democracy and explore authoritarian and monarchical alternatives. Along these lines, Moldbug himself writes that democracy is a “dangerous, malignant form of government which tends to degenerate, sometimes slowly and sometimes with shocking, gut-wrenching speed, into tyranny and chaos.”

The movement portrays Trump as a messianic hero, destined to save the country from the so-called “Deep State,” which is considered to be pedophilic and satanic. Trump’s 2016 victory — with his authoritarian ways, his departure from established conservative values, and his challenge to the media and political norms — seemed to be in tune with the tenets of NRx and likely helped encourage these ideas. NRx believes that it’s necessary to combat a conglomerate that exercises ideological control — dubbed “the Cathedral” (something like Gramscian hegemony) — where major media outlets, universities, and other elite institutions meet to maintain the status quo. The “red pill” offered by Yarvin — already an icon of this dissident right — is the one that supposedly helps you escape from this matrix.

Upon reflection, the NRx proposal isn’t very different from the dystopian future described in cyberpunk science fiction, in which large corporations dominate a hyper-technological society. Such a tremendously unequal technocracy is also known as technofeudalism, in which power is concentrated in large corporations, which citizens depend on for the most fundamental aspects of their lives.

Healing the state of democracy

The Cathedral is a concept that connects with the notion of the Deep State… conspiracies pedaled by QAnon. In this framework, Trump is a messianic hero who has come to save the United States from said Deep State and from the “swamp” that is Washington, D.C. “NRx is also connected to the alt-right in terms of ideas of white supremacy and anti-feminism,” Caro points out, “although NRx has a more elitist and less popular character than the alt-right.” Yarvin has fallen into white supremacist opinions, has downplayed Nazism, or has suggested that certain races are more conducive to being enslaved than others… although, generally speaking, NRx is more focused on technological and libertarian ideas. Coming from the Austrian school of economics, as a devout follower of Friedrich Hayek, Yarvin recognizes that the state cannot be eliminated, but “at least it can be cured of democracy,” as Nick Land writes.

Land, an eccentric and obscure British philosopher, writes hallucinatory texts of theory-fiction. He’s considered to be the founder of accelerationism, a breeding ground from which another famous thinker also emerged: Mark Fisher (1968-2017). Land has taken Yarvin’s ideas and has developed them under the name of the Dark Enlightenment, adding touches of transhuman futurism. The Dark Enlightenment overlaps with the system of neo-cameralism, in which a state is governed like a company, in search of maximum efficiency and profitability, without having to constrain itself to democratic, short-term goals. Each state would fight to retain its clients and try to prevent them from becoming dissatisfied and leaving for another state. “Land insists that democracy is evil and [proposes] a very strong social Darwinism,” Caro explains. “People aren’t strong, they’re dependent on others. [Therefore, according to him], the best system of government is a state controlled by technological corporations, in which you should buy more shares to have more say.”

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, is another pillar of the movement. He’s been a fervent financier of Yarvin and other neo-reactionaries since the movement’s beginnings. The Silicon Valley magnate has also financed the Seastanding Institute — founded by Patri Friedman, the grandson of the neoliberal godfather, Milton Friedman — which aims to create anarcho-capitalist utopias on islands, as well as maritime platforms located in international waters. These sites would be governed according to Yarvin’s notion of neo-cameralism. In 2009, in a text for the libertarian Cato Institute, the multibillionaire Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Thiel is also the mentor and benefactor of Senator J. D. Vance, the vice president-elect of the United States (as well as a follower of Yarvin). Steve Bannon, who was Trump’s guru, has also had contact with the founder of NRx. These connections offer an idea about how close the neo-reactionary movement may be to the next administration in the White House. Traditional conservatism, meanwhile, is still trying to find its place. “It’s true that Vance [is familiar] with NRx ideas,” Hawley explains. “It’s less evident that these ideas drive his governing philosophy… although it’s clear that he’s less enamored with traditional conservatism than many other Republican leaders. I don’t have inside information to confirm this, but I strongly suspect that Trump has no knowledge of NRx.”

Neo-reactionary influence

It remains to be seen how much influence the vice president will have on the new government. However, the greatest impact of NRx could be in more flexible areas, such as technological regulations and cryptocurrencies. “More generally, neo-reactionaries are excited by the prospect of an imperial presidency, where power is concentrated in the hands of a single man, with few checks and balances on that power,” Wendling notes. This power will surely be questioned by progressive local and state governments, as well as by moderate Republican sectors.

Not many people know about these authors and these ideas, which retain a certain transgressive tint. However, some of them — often only partially and without the authors being cited — “are circulating on social media more and more. Their influence is growing: just think that businessmen as powerful and influential as Thiel or Musk promote them,” says historian Steven Forti, author of Extreme Rights 2.0, A Big Global Family (2021). The breeding ground is fertile, because algorithms favor the spread of extremist content. Conspiracy theories — with their simple solutions to complexity — often find followers. And sympathy for authoritarian leaders grows as disaffection in democracy grows. “Is it so strange, then, that there are people who are starting to believe these theories?” Forti asks.

The Enlightenment remains the enemy of the far right in the 21st century. This has been made clear by the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, or Russian nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin. And such was the case in the 20th century as well, with, for instance, the far-right philosopher Julius Evola, or journalist Alain de Benoist, a founding member of the Nouvelle Droite (France’s New Right). But neoliberalism, with its promotion of individualism and competitiveness, as well as its deterioration of the common space, has also made a dent in the values of social welfare and fraternity. By increasing inequality, it has distorted democratic values.

“NRx claims to embrace the collapse of the West and the forces of chaos… but, as Claudio Kulesko has written, these forces of chaos are something that not even they could control,” concludes Federico Fernández Giordiano, who has edited the Spanish translations of Nick Land’s works. “Their mistake is to try to extract a pre-modern and cameralist order from the future. But chaos always produces novelty. Therefore, its trajectory cannot be fixed in any configuration from the past.” He adds: “Whatever emerges from chaos (or from the collapse of the world order), it won’t be what [the neo-reactionaries] expect.”

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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